China’s State Administration for Market Regulation fined Alibaba the equivalent of $2.8 billion in April 2021, saying it had abused its market position. The fine was equivalent to about 4% of 2019 domestic revenue.
Daniel Zhang (pictured), chairman and CEO of the Alibaba Group, said: “Alibaba achieved a historic milestone of one billion annual active consumers globally in the fiscal year ended March 2021.”
About a quarter of them are outside China.
He noted: “Our overall business delivered strong growth on a healthy foundation, with the Alibaba Ecosystem generating a record $1.2 trillion in GMV [gross merchandise value] during this fiscal year.”
Zhang added: “Such achievements were built on top of clear value propositions that we offer to consumers and merchants. We remain very excited about the growth of China’s consumption economy, which is benefiting from the acceleration of digitalization in all aspects of life and work.”
In the full year to 31 March Alibaba grew its revenue by 32%, “excluding the consolidation of the newly-acquired Sun Art”, said Zhang. “This was driven by robust performance of our core commerce businesses as well as continued growth of Alibaba Cloud.”
Sun Art is a supermarket company in which Alibaba bought a 72% stake for $3.6 billion in October 2020.
Maggie Wu, CFO of Alibaba, said the group expects revenue of 930 billion renminbi in the current year. That is equivalent to $145 billion.
“Given the market potential and our proven profit and cash flow generation capabilities, we plan to use all of our incremental profits and additional capital in fiscal year 2022 to support our merchants and invest into new businesses and key strategic areas that will help us increase consumer wallet share and penetrate into new addressable markets,” said Wu.
Alibaba said that annual active consumers for its ecosystem reached a milestone over one billion, “including 891 million consumers across our China retail marketplace, local consumer services and digital media and entertainment platforms”, with approximately 240 million consumers outside China — a total of 1.13 billion.
“Annual active consumers on our China retail marketplaces was 811 million, an increase of 85 million from the 12 months ended 31 March 2020,” said Alibaba.
